Chinese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Here's a picture I have found on flickr, taken in an outdoor museum in South Korea. I can only recognize the 1st, 3rd and 4th characters: 寶X山房. 寶 is probably not the variant written on the wooden board, but it's the same character. What is the 2nd character?
The original high resolution image is here.
EDIT： My best guess is 丁, but why this odd curvy shape when the rest of the characters are rendered fairly standard?
It looks like it is indeed 丁. The Flickr link mentioned the photo was taken at 茶山草堂. With that information, I was able to find another site with a photo of the same doorway indicating that it says 寶丁山房.
I don't know the specific reason why the character is stylized in this way, though 茶山 refers to the pen name of Joeng Yak-yong (丁若鏞), so it could be in reference to his surname, 丁.
If this blog and that are correct, these four characters are indeed 寶丁山房, penned by the famous Korean calligrapher Kim Jeong-hui 金正喜 in memory of 丁若鏞.
The characters on this wooden board look like 隸書 calligraphy to me. Please compare with the 隸書 section in the calligraphy samples of 寶, 丁, 山, and 房 respectively. It seems like Kim is being creative with the 丁 character here. I don't know much about Kim's style but thanks to this google books search I found out a bit more about his creative style.
